Remittance money helps build schools, hospitals and playgrounds. It also fuels a drug problem in Punjab.

An addiction treatment centre at Rasulra village near Ludhiana city in northern India. Experts say one reason for the drug problem in the state of Punjab is the influx of foreign money from remittances.

RASULRA, INDIA—Rasulra is a mid-size village like many others in the state of Punjab: there are some big concrete mansions, smaller brick houses, a few stores on the main street and stray dogs that playfully chase cars.

Like many other villages, it also has an addiction treatment centre.

Jeevanjot Addiction Centre isn’t concealed behind a big building or tiny entrance. It is two-storeys, right on the main street with three signs announcing its presence.

“It doesn’t feel strange to have it in the middle of the village,” says Sukhvinder Seeka, head of the village council. “Everyone knows there is a big problem … if we tried to hide it, how would we deal with it?”

Punjab, India’s most prosperous state, has a serious drug problem. There has been no wide-ranging study, yet, to uncover the depth of the scourge but some surveys have thrown up frightful numbers: In a court submission in 2009, a top bureaucrat said more than two-thirds of the state’s rural households have at least one drug addict. Then, it was estimated that 66 per cent of Punjab’s youths were addicted to some kind of drug. In 2009 during a visit to Punjab, Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the then ruling Gandhi family, said that 70 per cent of the state’s youth were addicted to drugs.

One reason — a small one — is because of foreign money, which some experts say fuels flashy lifestyles of fast cars and expensive drugs.

“There is easy access,” says Sanjeev Kant, an addiction counsellor in nearby Ludhiana. “No one has to go far looking for drugs . . . it is all right there.”

Punjab, which has one of the largest diasporas in the world, has always received remittances from Europe, North America, even Africa — funds that have helped build schools, hospitals and even addiction treatment centres. But experts say access to easy money has created dropouts, unemployment and addiction.

Typically, it happens in an extended family where one or two sons have immigrated to North America and the rest of the family is still in Punjab.

Kant says families will rarely admit to what is going on “but it becomes obvious. One son is in England or Canada, there is a lot of money and no one works …”

He tries to counsel family members, too. In one case, he advised an elderly mother not to give money that she received from her older son in England to the younger one still living at home.

“She cried and she said she couldn’t do that because her (younger) son is heartbroken that he hasn’t been able to immigrate.”

Punjab’s drug problem isn’t new, its genesis lies in exploitative landowners. For years, they gave opium to migrant farm labourers so they could work longer, harder. But in the past 20 years or so, Punjab, the northern Indian state that borders Pakistan, has also become a major transit route for the world’s main poppy-growing and heroin-producing centre that includes Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

Afghan heroin is smuggled into Pakistan and then into India, mostly through Punjab. It is transported to Mumbai and shipped to the West.

Now, some areas in Punjab are the hub for synthetic drugs, others are known for heroin and cocaine use. In some areas, opium and poppy husk are still the drugs in demand.